Friday, April 25, 2008

Politicians Call for More Google Maps Mashups

The Conservative Party, one of the two main political parties in the UK, has called for every police force in the country to produce a map mash-up showing where crimes have been committed. The statement was a leading story on last night's BBC news.

The Conservative Party plan refers to CrimeReports.com in the US as an example of the kind of map that they want UK police forces to produce. We reported last month on how CrimeReports was being adopted by police departments in fifteen states in America. On Monday of this week we posted reviews of a number of other crime maps.

One of the maps reviewed on Monday was my own London Crime Map, which when compared with the CrimeReports map is a good example of the problems being highlighted by the Conservatives in producing UK crime maps. Police forces in the UK only produce crime data on an area by area basis and do not reveal the exact location of where crimes are committed. The London Crime Map therefore only gives crime statistics of neighbourhoods rather than mapping individual crimes like CrimeReports.

Even More Crime Maps

Coincidentally the Google LatLong blog today links to another example of a crime map produced by CBS in Chicago.

The City Under Fire map is a My Map designed to keep residents informed about the spate of shootings that have taken place in the city recently.

CrimiCrimi is a Polish crime map that tags individual crimes on a Google Map. Clicking on a tag opens an information window giving details of the crime. The data can also be sorted by date, so it is possible to see whether crime is rising or falling in an area.

Anchorage Crime MapThe Anchorage Crime Map is a mash-up of crime data for Anchorage, Alaska. On this map crimes are recorded every day to give a daily overview of crime in Anchorage. The crimes are colour-coded by type of crime and it is possible to sort the data by day to get an overview of crime in the city on any given day.

Brennende-AutosBrennende-Autos is a very specific crime mash-up as it is only concerned with torched vehicles in Berlin. If this map is any evidence this seems to be a very big problem in the city. Each tag on the map gives the name of the type of vehicle involved as well as the date it was torched.